LHC magnet upgrade will pave the way for exciting discoveries in physics

American physicists knew when they were building the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, the project would eventually need to upgrade its powerful magnets, and now, researchers have just finished successful tests of a prototype superconducting accelerator magnet.

“Building this magnet prototype was truly an international effort,” Lucio Rossi, the head of the High-Luminosity (HighLumi) LHC project at CERN, said in a news release. “Half the magnetic coils inside the prototype were produced at CERN, and half at laboratories in the United States.”

Engineers are expected to incorporate greater than 20 magnets based on the prototype into the next version of the LHC, which will debut in 2026 and raise the LHC’s luminosity by a factor of ten, equal to a ten-fold boost in the data rate.

Prototype ready for further testing

The 5-foot-long prototype, which is a fully operational accelerator magnet, went through an intense evaluating program, which it passed in March. The model will now go through a comprehensive series of stamina and stress tests to emulate the challenging conditions within a particle accelerator.

This new kind of magnet will replace around 5 percent of the LHC’s concentrating and steering magnets when the accelerator is modified into the High-Luminosity LHC.

The LHC’s magnets are made by continuously winding a superconducting cable into long coils. These coils are then attached to all sides of the beam pipe and enveloped within a cryogenic system. When cooled to 1.9 Kelvin, the coils can transport a tremendous quantity of electrical current with no electrical resistance. By adjusting the quantity of current running through the coils, engineers can change the strength and quality of the magnetic field it produces and control the particles within the accelerator.

“We’re dealing with a new technology that can achieve far beyond what was possible when the LHC was first constructed,” said Giorgio Apollinari, a project scientist at the federal government’s Fermilab. “This new magnet technology will make the HL-LHC project possible and empower physicists to think about future applications of this technology in the field of accelerators.”

Creating a moose-sized magnet from highly-fragile material wasn’t easy and researchers spent a decade planning and perfecting a process to wind, shape, bake, and strengthen the coils.

“This test showed that it is possible,” Apollinari said. “The next step is it to apply everything we’ve learned moving from this prototype into bigger and bigger magnets.”

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Image credit:  Reidar Hahn, Fermilab

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